An architecture for assembling agents that participate in alternative heterogeneous auctions

This paper addresses the issue of developing agents capable of participating in several potentially simultaneous auctions of different kinds (English, First-Price, Vickrey), with the goal of finding the best price for an item on behalf of their users. Specifically, a multi-agent architecture is proposed, in which a manager agent cooperates with several expert agents, each specialised in a specific kind of auction. The expert agents communicate their knowledge to the manager agent in the form of probability functions, capturing the likelihood that a bid of a given price may win an auction. Given a set of such functions, the manager agent builds a bidding plan that it executes in concert with the expert agents.